The Steampunk Trilogy (12 page)

The window was not secured. Agassiz raised it and cautiously poked his head in. The interior was dark, and he could not see much, but it appeared empty. He levered himself up and hung, half-in and half-out, for a moment. Then with an effort, he boosted himself all the way in, tumbling noisily and unceremoniously to the floor.

Getting to his knees, Agassiz lifted his head.

The barrel of the gun pointed at him approached in diameter the trunk of an Indian elephant (
Elephas maximus
).
Or so it seemed.

“Stand up,” said the shadowy figure holding the weapon, “and walk ahead.”

Agassiz did as he was ordered.

Followed by his captor, Agassiz debouched from the storeroom where he had fallen into a huge space illuminated by upper-story windows and dominated by three or four Brobdingnagian wooden vats, their tops accessible by catwalks around them. In one wall was the front door at which he had recently knocked.

Slowly, Agassiz turned.

The man holding the gun on him was clad entirely in black, from his flat, wide-brimmed black hat to his black cape, black trousers and black boots. In sharp contrast stood his pale face framed by longish red hair. Fierce and fiery mustachios half concealed his thin lips.

“Who are you, sir?” asked Agassiz.

The man threw back his head and laughed uproariously and not a little insanely.

“My name is Anarchos! But the world knows me as Feargus Kosciuszko.”

Agassiz gaped. So, here was the notorious Irish-Polish revolutionary Cezar had warned him of. And he had Agassiz at his mercy. The scientist stiffened his spine. He would show this Byronic Bakuninist that breeding would always have the upper hand over bohemianism.

“What have you done with the owners of this business?”

“Only what should be done to all capitalist swine. I have bound them, trounced them and locked them in their office upstairs. Do you object?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I object to such inhuman treatment, even of abolitionists—”

Kosciuszko pounced. “Abolitionists! How do you know they are of that persuasion?”

“Well, I—that is—”

“You are after the fetiche! Admit it!”

Agassiz saw no point in pretending ignorance any longer. “Yes, I am. But for the sake of science, not for personal gain.”

“ Ah, we are kindred spirits then. You see, I am not interested in personal gain either. I want the fetiche for the cause of chaos!”

“I don’t understand—”

“Ah, neither did the Ruffins. I appealed to them first as a comrade in the war against injustice. But their devotion to the movement had been tainted by their stake in society. When I explained what I intended, they refused to tell me where the Hottentot had fled. Yes, don’t look so surprised, he’s gone. I searched the premises thoroughly, and can assure you of that. But have no fear, it’s only a matter of time before I catch up with him and wrest the fetiche away. Then I shall be empowered to do what I have long dreamed of doing—destroying all authority everywhere, and freeing humanity from its chains!”

Aggasiz blurted out, “You—you’re mad!”

Kosciuszko did not seem offended. “Perhaps. But the purity of my madness gives me my strength. And you too would be mad, if you had seen all I have.”

“I think not.”

Kosciuszko narrowed his eyes. “Do you know how I arrived in this hemisphere, sir? No? Let me tell you, then.

“The ‘coffin ship’—for that is what those in the know call such vessels—named
Urania
sailed from Cork in March. It was packed with hundreds of my kinsmen fleeing the Irish Famine. Crammed into the foul holds they were, men, women and children, with no accommodations for common decency. And with them was one additional passenger.

“Typhus!

“It was not a swift trip. Seven weeks it took. And by the time we arrived in Canadian waters, half the passengers were either dead or dying. I shall never forget the things I saw and heard. The gasping of the afflicted, the wails of children, the ravings of the delirious, the cries and groans of those in mortal agony!

“We were sent to Grosse Isle, to be quarantined. Our heartless crew was frantic to be rid of us. They literally dumped us out onto the beaches, leaving many unable to drag themselves from the slime in which they lay, where they finally breathed their last, God have mercy on their souls!

“There were only unheated sheds to hold us, and little food. No doctors, naturally, would visit us. Every day we were told the quarantine would be lifted. Every day we consigned more bodies to the common grave-pits! Every day more ships arrived from Europe, bringing the hopeful to the Land of Opportunity!

“When I finally made my escape, over five hundred had perished.

“This was my introduction to the brave New World! Like a black slave I arrived, all shreds of innocence burned away, my faith in armed resistance intensified a thousand times!

“But I should have expected as much. Everywhere in my travels I have seen the common man ground down, crushed under the boots of his rulers as if he were no more than an ant! Consider my father’s homeland, Poland. Partitioned by the Prussians, Russians and Austrians, its brightest sons and daughters scattered across the globe, its free farmers reduced to serfs! Ah, she has suffered, my country. But her sufferings will redeem the globe!

“Do not think, however, that my heart is concerned only with my maternal and paternal countries. Far from it! I am one with all struggling people everywhere.

“I was there in spirit, cheering, when Louis went to the guillotine, standing beside Marat and Robespierre! I fought next to Toussaint L’Ouverture when he liberated Haiti! I was with the Cato Street Conspirators when the London police broke in and slaughtered them! I battled side by side with Simón Bolivar and Bernardo O’Higgins in South America!

“And even though I have never stood in body on these American shores before, my ardent soul was here!

“I encouraged the slaves Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to revolt! I died with the Redsticks at Horseshoe Bend! I rode with the Anti-Renters in the Hudson Valley, hanging landlords! I raised my rifle with Thomas Dorr in Rhode Island against the militia come to strip us of the franchise! I manned the barricades during the general strike in Philadelphia and the bank riots in Baltimore! I roused the Journeymen Tailors of New York with my handbills. Listen to what I wrote: ‘The rich against the poor! Mechanics and working men! Why do you let the rich decree that they are the only judges of your wants?’

“And not just political rebellion did I support, but also individual crimes, for where the law is on the side of the rich, crime is the only resort of the poor. Highwaymen and murderers are my brothers, the whore and the cutpurse my cousins. I sang along with the desperadoes in California. ‘What was your name in the States?/Was it Taylor or Johnson or Bates?/Did you murder your wife/And flee for your life?/Oh, what was your name in the states?’”

Kosciuszko accompanied this song with a little polka-jig.

“All this and more I cheered on. And now that I am here in the flesh, I shall do even more! A man named John Brown has plans—But I will not spoil the surprises in store for you. Soon the whole world will recognize my handiwork. Once I have the fetiche, the tyrants will fall by the scores! But for the nonce, I must content myself with smaller acts of rebellion.”

Removing some rope from beneath his cape, Kosciuszko approached Agassiz and expertly bound his wrists and ankles and forced him to sit in the middle of the floor. The mad agitator pocketed his gun and moved to the base of the vats. There he picked up a long-handled ax.

Agassiz watched in astonishment. “Surely you don’t intend—”

“Ah, but I do. Let us say it is an illustration of how the whole system will soon be clogged with the blood of dictators. . . .”

Kosciuszko climbed onto the catwalks and began swinging his ax against the metal hoops that bound the staves of a vat. He worked like a fiend. As Agassiz watched, horrified, a hoop snapped and the staves of the vat began to bow outward, a trickle of brown fluid slowly oozing out from between. Kosciuszko quickly moved to the next vessel.

Soon, all the vats were bulging outward.

From above, Kosciuszko paused to survey his work. Then he addressed Agassiz.

“A million gallons of molasses, sir. Now do you regret the Triangle Trade?”

“I had nothing to do with that!” wailed Agassiz. But it was too late, for, with a swirl of his cape, Kosciuszko had fled by an upper door.

Under the irresistible pressure of the treacle, the staves bent, bent, bent—

Then gave way!

The flood of molasses washed over Agassiz like a tidal wave. He felt himself lifted up and carried away. Struggling with bound limbs to keep his head above the surface, he tumbled and spun. Molasses filled his eyes and nostrils, ears and mouth.

He surfaced briefly. Without witnessing it, he had passed outside. The molasses had swept through the warehouse doors as if they didn’t exist, and now filled the narrow channel of Hull street, a glistening brown flood deep as the lintels of the second-floor windows, racing downhill as fast as—well, molasses.

Tumbled over and over, Agassiz fought vainly to free his arms. His sticky head broke the surface once, twice—He gasped for air, tried to kick his legs—

Just as he was going under for the third time, he felt his shirt snatched by strong hands. He was lifted partway out of the flood, which still tugged at his lower limbs with grasping viscous claws.

He had no idea who had snatched him. His eyes were gummed shut. He tried to utter his thanks, but couldn’t.

Agassiz hung suspended for he knew not how long. He sensed the level of the molasses flood gradually descending. Finally, he was released, to drop a few feet to the ground.

Someone was coming toward him, heralded by the sucking noises of footsteps. Soon, Agassiz felt his bonds being undone.

When his hands were free, his rescuer began to clean his eyes with a cloth. Agassiz found he could open them once more.

Such a scene of devastation he had never before imagined.

Carts and wagons were crushed against buildings slathered with treacle. Dead horses lay everywhere, and also not a few human corpses, of which he should by all rights have been one. People looked incredulously out of their second-floor windows at the wreckage interspersed with brown puddles.

Cezar stood beside him, a sticky handkerchief in hand. Agassiz burst out into fervent thanks.

“I owe you my life, Jacob—”

“Not me. It vas Dottie who saved you. Look!”

Cezar pointed upward. Agassiz looked.

Hanging by her knees from a clothesline, her petticoats immodestly showing as her skirt fell downward, was the Hottentot. It was her strong grip that had lifted him from the molasses stream, as attested to by her wet hands.

Agassiz opened his mouth, but could not repeat the words he had freely given to Cezar.

Cezar did not seem inclined to chastise him after what he had undergone. The big South African only said, “I’m delling you, if vee only had zome flapjacks now, vee’d be all zet!”

6

ONE OR ONE HUNDRED?

S
CRUB AS HE
would, it took three days for the smell of molasses emanating from Agassiz’s person to partially abate. The sweetly cloying aroma took away all his appetites, both gustatory and sexual, and he spent the majority of those hours alone in his study, attempting to divert himself from his problems by idly outlining some embryonic ideas. One of the most promising, he decided, was the notion of creating an organization to be called the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A guild for scientists was an idea whose time was long overdue. Not only would the massed influence of many learned men serve to entrench science more firmly at the trough of public and private endowment, elbowing aside such useless feeders as poets and painters, but such a group would also provide many valuable contacts who would help advance Agassiz’s own career. . . .

During his seclusion, Agassiz let his household run itself. He suspected that he would ultimately regret indulging Desor’s natural inclination to take charge, but did not have the energy or interest to do otherwise.

Neither did he concern himself during this period with the South African, his Hottentot mate, nor their quarry. He was thoroughly fed up with the whole affair and the burdens it had thrust upon him. Why, he had almost lost his life due to the insane quest! And how it rankled to think that he owed his continued earthly existence to the monkey-like agility of the Aboriginal. . . . What mordant irony! He still shuddered at the memory of her unclean hands upon his clothing.

As if sensing his attitude, Cezar and Dottie did not disturb the cloistered Swiss savant. How they were occupying their time did not concern him, and he strove to pretend that they had never intruded on his practical and well-regulated life.

But try as he might, Agassiz was unable to entirely dismiss the affair from his mind. There was one facet that still lured him on: the Cosmogonic Locus.

To be able to prove—perhaps even be a direct witness to the fact—that all species were created fully formed, bearing their ultimate shapes; to soundly refute the spinelessly anonymous author of
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
and his followers, with their heretical theory that higher forms “descended” from lower ones—Such an accomplishment would be the crowning victory of Natural Theology, and would insure that the name of Louis Agassiz would live as long as men venerated their immortal souls.

By the morning of the fourth day, when the treacly nimbus of fragrance surrounding Agassiz was little stronger than what one might experience had one dropped a bottle of sugarcane-extract in an adjacent room, Agassiz was feeling somewhat more mellow toward humanity in general and toward his personal retinue in particular. He was just on the point of venturing out of his sanctum sanctorum for the first time in days when there came a timorous knock on the door.

Jane stuck her head meekly in. “Sir, you have visitors. Two Frenchmen—”

“By all means send them in. And Jane—”

“Yes, sir?”

“You look exceedingly charming today. Has anyone ever commented on your resemblance to a Constable milkmaid before? No? Ah, what a coquettish laugh you have! Perhaps a little later—?”

“Oh, Lor’, sir, you’ll turn a girl’s head! We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

Jane departed in a swirl of flounces, and the visitors entered.

One man was a foppish pot-bellied and spindle-shanked fellow in his mid-sixties, lace at his sleeves and neck, a gold-headed walking stick in his hand. His companion was a younger man in plainer vestments with a hayrick of hair. It was apparent from their relative stances and demeanors that they stood to each other as teacher and pupil, or mentor and apprentice. Both radiated a rather disconcerting aura of otherworldly fanaticism which was perhaps more intense—or simply less well-concealed—in the younger.

The elder of the pair now spoke. “
M’sieu
Agassiz, permit me. I am Jósef Maria Hoene-Wro´nski, and this is Alphonse Louis Constant.”

“Levi,” interrupted the younger man in a sepulchral tone. “My name is Eliphas Levi, mage of Sarnath, seer of Unknown Kadath.”

Hoene-Wro´nski appeared somewhat embarrassed. “Ha, ha, yes, very good, many-titled Levi you shall be. Pardon my forgetfulness, your exaltedness. Ahem. In any case, we are here,
M’sieu
Agassiz, as a delegation from an order you have perhaps heard of. Is the name Martines de Pasqually familiar to you?”

Agassiz recalled the accusation made by Cezar on the night of his arrival, that Baron Georges Cuvier, Agassiz’s first patron, had been connected with a secret society known as the Martinists. Was Hoene-Wro´nski alluding to them?

Agassiz pretended ignorance. “No, I think not. Wait—wasn’t he the imaginary scholar in Voltaire?”

Hoene-Wro´nski exhumed a chilling laugh. “Ha, ha, very witty, you make a play on Doctor Pangloss. I appreciate a sense of humor in an opponent. But one must know where to draw the line between what is ha-ha-funny and what is deadly serious. And the matter of the Venus Hottentot’s fetiche is most definitely in the latter camp.”

Opening his mouth to deny all involvement, Agassiz was forestalled by Hoene-Wro´nski.

“Please do not insult my intelligence by protesting your innocence. I know that you have already met with my countryman, Kosciuszko. That one is an unreliable rogue, I tell you. Even though I share to some extent his beliefs in the inevitable glorious destiny of Poland, I cannot endorse his anarchism. The man is the black night of chaos personified, a walking Armageddon, and I advise you to seriously reconsider any deals you have cut with him.”

“Deals? I made no deals. Why, he tried to murder me. . . .”

Hoene-Wro´nski spread his hands. “There, you see? Trying to murder his partner. Completely untrustworthy, as I avouched.”

“Wait a minute, we were never partners!”

“Pah, old relationships are so much water over the bridge and under the dam, not worth the blood they were written in. I take it for granted then that I can count on your cooperation in relinquishing the fetiche to us, should you find it before we do? After all, we represent your Baron Cuvier’s old associates.”

“I still cannot reconcile to myself the Baron’s involvement with your sect. Surely it was but a momentary dalliance No, your hopes are futile. I would never surrender the fetich the occultists such as yourself. If I find it, I intend to use it purely for scientific purposes, for the betterment of all mankind.”

“Do not try to sell me the same line of shoddy goods you peddle to your audiences of mechanics and clerks, M’sieu!
I know you seek raw power alone, as do we all. But I warn you, the power contained in the fetiche is more potent than you know, and you will surely be consumed by it.”

Constant—or Levi—had been glaring at Agassiz in a decidedly disconcerting manner all this while. Now, of a sudden, his eyes rolled back into his head and he croaked out a string of guttural nonsense syllables. To Agassiz, they sounded like: “Yi-yi, shoob nigger wrath!”

Alarmed, Hoene-Wro´nski slapped the young man several times across the face. “Alfie, Alfie, come back! Reel your soul in, for Hermes’s sake! Do not pass the Seventh Gate!”

After a second or two, Constant returned to reality, trembling and seemingly exhausted.

Agassiz was not impressed. “A splendid show, gentleman. May I join in? ‘Yippie-ki-yi-yo, the revenge of Sambo!’ Well, this has been great fun. If I am ever in need of entertainment for a child’s birthday party, I will call on you. Meanwhile, I believe our business is concluded.”

“You were warned,” Hoene-Wro´nski said as he exited, supporting Constant. “If you come to your senses, you can reach us at the Tremont Hotel.”

Once Agassiz had assured himself that the eccentric duo had left the grounds, he headed toward the workroom, eager to see what progress had been made on the various projects underway.

Opening the door to the laboratory, he was greeted with a scene he at first could not credit.

Maurice Desor stood atop a packing crate which held a shipment of fossils from Gideon Algernon Mantell, the respected author of
Fossils of the South Downs
.
Seated raptly around him were Agassiz’s four assistants. Edward Desor was standing proudly by, as if Maurice were Junius Brutus Booth declaiming Shakespeare, and Edward were his manager.

Maurice was reaching the climax of his speech. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs! Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing—”

“What is going on here?!” bellowed Agassiz.

Maurice paused. “I was merely trying to engage your wage slaves in a dialectic.”

“Wage slaves! By God, who paid your passage over here, you insolent ingrate?! I’ve a mind to thrash it out of your hide! Get down off that box!”

“The First Amendment—”

Agassiz roared, and launched himself at Maurice.

The chubby Marxist belied his girth by dashing swiftly for the door. Agassiz gave up the chase and turned on the audience.

“Well, what are you all gawping at? Are you a school of mouth-breeders? Smartly now, back to work!”

Pourtales, Girard, Burckhardt and Sonrel sheepishly returned to their labors. Agassiz rounded on Desor.

“And as for you—”

“Please, I am not at fault. Maurice promised me he wanted only to inspire the team to greater efforts.”

“Inspire them? Any more such inspiration, and I would have been lynched like a disobedient slave! No, we’ll have no more of this Blanquist rhetoric in my house. Am I understood?”

“As you wish,” said Desor blandly.

Agassiz chose not to press for a firmer promise. “Now, where is Cezar?”

“I hardly know. On his boat, I suppose. Must I manage everything around here, down to the itinerary of visiting savages?”

“That is indeed your job.”

Desor made a dismissive gesture, as if his job were a housefly (
Musca domestica
) to be shooed away, and left.

Agassiz ventured out onto the back lawn that sloped away down to his private dock. Above the
Sie Koe
hung a bluish cloud of smoke. Agassiz noted that any mosquitoes (probably
Anophelini maculipennis
)
that chanced to pass through the haze fell dead immediately to the deck. Next to the South African ship was anchored another, bearing the name
Dolly Peach
.
Although he had never noticed Captain Stormfield’s vessel before, he was convinced that the
Dolly Peach
was it. Perhaps the telltale sign was the skeleton of a sea-snake (an anonymous
Hydrophiidæ
)
mounted on the binnacle: the vertebrae split and terminated in two skulls.

Once aboard the
Sie Koe
,
Agassiz cautiously poked his head into the cabin.

Cezar and Stormfield sat on opposite sides of a low table, both puffing contentedly. On the table a game of checkers was in progress. Each player fielded half a dozen “kingers,” some of them triples. As Agassiz watched, Stormfield executed a move resembling the path of a drunken frog (
Rana esculenta
), only to capture a single piece and end up where he started.

Agassiz’s eyes roved the cabin for the loathsome Hottentot. Much to his relief, her primitive form was absent.

Cezar spotted the visitor. “Ah, Louis, velcome! Vould you care to choin us in a game of draughts? Dere’s always room for a dhird.”

“No, I have no time for games. Have you forgotten the quarry we seek?”

“Ach, of course not. But until vee get anudder clue, I’m frankly ztumped! Dere’s no use running around chust for der zake of running.”

“There’s been no further developments in the past few days then, I take it.”

“None.”

Despairing at this news, Agassiz forced out an allusion to the third member of the search party. “Perhaps your missing wife has her nose to the ground even now—?”

“Unfortunately, Dottie ist chust as dumbfounded as I am. No, zhe’s gone to a lecture. Dot former zlave who preaches der vomen’s emancipation—vot’s her name?—ah, Sojourner Druth—ist zpeaking at der Howard Athenaeum.”

“You let your wife attend a lecture by that unnatural and most unfeminine of creatures? Are you mad, man? Have you read the proceedings of that Women’s Convention they held in Seneca Falls a few years ago? Stanton, Mott, Truth—they’re all cold-blooded witches! Do you know what they’re advocating? They want women to be able to vote, to hold property—even to attend college! How can you let your wife hear such ideas? Why, you’ll be lucky if she does not murder you one night in your bed.”

Cezar smiled reminiscently. “Vhen vee go to bed, dot’s not vot’s on our minds.”

Agassiz was disgusted, and turned away. “Be it on your own head, then!”

Captain Stormfield sought diplomatically to intervene. “Don’t be a stubborn old cuss, Perfesser. If Jake wants to let his hen help rule the roost, then who’s to say him no? The times, they are a-changin’, and we got to change with them. Why, look at me. I ain’t hardly no pantywaist—I licked my share o’ hurricanes, human and otherwise—but my gal Dolly pretty much does as she pleases. Consider how she took that there swordfish away from me for her own purposes. Oh, by the way, as I pree-dicted, the poor finny creature expired from overwork. Dolly pushed it harder than a Lynn shoe-factory girl. But before I could rescue the remains, she had consigned ’em to the local taxidermist, outta some kinda sentimental impulse. The results are a-hangin’ in my cabin. Would ye care to see the deceased anyhow?”

Agassiz spoke in a perturbed tone. “Captain Stormfield—”

“Please, Louie, we done been friends for a significant stretch of time now. Call me Dan’l.”

“Very well. Daniel—”

“Not ‘Daniel.’ ‘Dan’l.’ Ye see, my folks was so poor, they couldn’t afford the extra vowels when it came time to christen me.”

Agassiz was extremely exasperated. “Your foolish personal history is of no interest to me! Please try not divert me again. I simply wish to say that I have no more desire to purchase any of your marine samples, bogus or otherwise. Why, when I went to examine that sea-robin the day after you sold it to me, I found only a pool of wretched slime, even though I had placed it on ice.”